Monthly Archives: February 2007

Paperless Grading

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After a quarter century of grading student essays & carring around a briefcase stuffed with student work for the better part of each semester, I am making the leap to on-line electronic grading. I am using Turnitin’s Grademark system &  though I’ve only done a few essays so far, it has been working very well. The system is flexible enough to let me underline, insert, highlight, drop in an icon that opens a comment, etc. There are also some rubric & grammar libraries I haven’t gotten into yet.

The main thing I notice is that I have been taking more time on each essay. More time than I can afford, actually. I’m hoping I’ll get more efficient as I become more familiar with the tool. I think that if students take the time to go through comments — which will be much easier for them given my scrawling handwriting — that this system will provide more effective written feedback than I have been able to give in the past. That is, I think this is a good tool. Maybe not revolutionary, but a real advance on paper & green pen.

Starlings

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Many people who like birds don’t like starlings. Non-native invasive species & all that, which is true enough. And they can be pests when they congregate in large groups. But I like them with their squat gold-flecked black bodies, yellow eyes, muscular flight, & ability to reproduce the sounds of other creatures. Konrad Lorenz claimed to have taught one to talk & apparently this is a fairly common occurrence. In the woods near an apartment in Seattle’s University District many years ago, I swear the local starlings learned to imitate the sounds of my neighbor’s cat meowing. They clear out of northern New York for the winter, but they arrive back before any of the other migrants. I won’t see robins for three weeks yet, but the starlings arrived yesterday.

Filtered Sunlight

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Woke this morning to clear blue sky & a temperature of six below zero, but over the course of the day a thin layer of clouds has covered the sky & the temperature has risen into the thirties. The sun feels stronger but far from its spring strength. Drank coffee & ate toast. By mid-morning the terrier Jett was demanding a walk & it had warmed up to fifteen degrees, so we set off with Jett & Angel for a forty minute walk. Pretty much a perfect Sunday morning, without anxieties. This afternoon I should be working on the website for my summer on-line course, but instead I’ve been fooling around with a poem in long lines & reading blogs. And after that I watched golf on television. A day without anxieties, except for the slight — very slight — anxiety of procrastination. And after the last couple of weeks, I’ll take it. Filtered sunlight.

Josh Marshall

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I’m usually to the left of Josh Marshall politically, but he’s the best writer in the left blogosphere. This is the final paragraph of a recent Marshall mini-essay on the surge.

Central to the Republican line on Iraq and much more to the Democratic one than I think is sometimes realized, our whole vision is now governed by Iraq-myopia, the delusion that our national destiny is at stake in Iraq. But it’s not. We’ve done horrible harm to ourselves and the Iraqis. It’s a disaster, a catastrophe. But it’s not everything. It’s actually not even close to everything. And until we really get our collective heads around that fact I doubt we’ll ever get ourselves free of this mess.

Moral Complicity in Genocide

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There is a foul moral odor rising from the University of Chicago. And it is not the first time. The decision not to divest holdings in Sudan — a paltry million dollars worth — is a disgusting administrative decision that turns out to be simply one more such  in a long tradition of moral blindness. The idea that “academic freedom” requires universities to pretend to some sort of weird Platonic neutrality in the face of genocide is . . . words fail.

How is this different from the peckerwood Arizona State Senator who wants to fine & fire professors who take political positions? Or serve as expert witnesses? Or simply do their jobs?